Thursday, February 26, 2015

I thought this article on the uncertain value of huge data pipes was quite good. Here's the payoff in case you don't want to click.

When the BTIG Research firm last October began covering the Internet pipe operator Cogent Communications , its report contained an amusing insight. Cogent’s last-mile business customers buy a service that offers 100 megabits per second. The average use by these customers, though, is only about 12 mbps, and barely “one or two dozen of their customers have ever reached 50% utilization of the 100 MB pipe,” says BTIG.

Yet despite this demonstration of how little bandwidth customers actually use, Cogent also offers a one-gigabit service. “Interestingly, the usage of these customers does not likely differ materially than their 100 MB customers,” says BTIG....Ten Netflix videos running simultaneously wouldn’t even consume 4% of the capacity (1 gigabit) that Google Fiber provides its customers.

We've had times in our house when several people are using the Internet pretty heavily all at once. Sometimes we have three high-bandwidth apps going simultaneously including a movie, a video game and a soccer game. I don't recall having much of a problem even under these conditions and that's with download speeds on the order of 16 MB.

If I'm restoring a crashed hard drive, I have to download about 120GB from Mozy. Other than that once-every-two-years event, I can't think of anything that could even come close to taxing a 100 MB pipe.

What would I do with 1 GB speed? What in the world could I possibly consume that would take even 100 MB of throughput?

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Now that we know who we're fighting - violent extremists - I think it's time for all of us to take part in this great crusade effort and keep our eyes open for the enemy. Who knows where an extremist will violently strike next?

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

When members of the Administration talk about how ISIS is not Islamic, when they can't mention Islamic terrorism without also mentioning the Crusades, when they use the euphemism "violent extremism" over and over again, they're not talking to us, they're talking to themselves. They're trying to convince themselves that there really is a sparkly unicorn called multiculturalism and it really is the Truth. To say otherwise puts a dagger in the heart of the secular, post-modern faith.

If ISIS and its colleagues are not aberrant, if they are Islamic with a genuine basis in an interpretation of the Koran, then either one culture is better than another or there is no definition of "better" at all. As soon as you admit one culture is superior to another, you instantly are forced into some kind of ranking system, one that undercuts all of the foundations of the multicultural belief system.

When we hear Administration spokescreatures, university professors and lefty pundits try to describe ISIS as some kind of fit of insanity, totally detached from Islam, they're not defending ISIS or Islam, they're defending themselves.

Monday, February 23, 2015

... it would probably make more sense than the college sophomore rubbish we have right now.

I was hanging out at a pub with a pack of Papists on Friday night and sitting near me were a pair of late-20s, early-30s young ladies. Both were single and attractive. They're high school teachers and we were talking about their students' reactions to 50 Shades of Gray. The kids didn't see what the big deal was with the movie. The two young women were trying to figure out how to express how awful it is for women to be turned into submissive objects for a man's sadism.

Ruminate on that last sentence for a second, pondering what it says about our culture.

During the discussion, the two sadly agreed that all the boys in their classes consume porn. It was dreadful, but just a fact of life for their generation. Here these two were lovely, engaging and fun and they could almost guarantee that the potential husbands around them watched porn. Their primary power over men was significantly weakened.

I wondered if that, coupled with the fact that most of their competition was putting out without much fuss, made most women just throw in the towel and surrender to the modern hook-up culture. It would either be that or spend a lot of date nights alone.

Back to the title of the post: 35-year-old women, if single and childless, are concerned with the quality of potential husbands. If married, they're concerned with the culture where their children will grow up. Almost none of them are concerned with trigger warnings, government-sponsored birth control or whether or not the LGBT community is fully realizing their Vaseline-slathered fantasies.

You'd have to think they'd do a better job than the college students and ivory tower academics who seem to dominate our cultural discussions.

Saturday, February 21, 2015

I figure that since he defends Islam when ISIS goes completely berserk and slaughters people and he runs about making speech after speech talking about how wonderful Muslims are and how ISIS isn't Muslim, he'll do the same for us when the KofC begin a similar reign of terror.

Friday, February 20, 2015

Me: You stink! And you're an idiot! I think you stink because you're an idiot!

Dale wants you to spend all this time figuring out what the other person wants and showing them how you can help them get it while complementing them and avoiding criticism.

All I can say is that the book stinks and I think it was written by an idiot. Now if you'll excuse me, there's a mob of people at my front door with pitchforks and boiling tar. They look to be frantically plucking chickens and piling up the feathers for some reason.

Thursday, February 19, 2015

Greece recently elected a government determined to put an end to that nasty austerity which was depriving the people of much-needed government money. Their determination is faltering in the face of account ledgers.

With the Greek state and its banks shut out of financial markets and dependent on emergency aid to stay afloat, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is retreating from his pledges to end austerity as the country’s creditors tighten the financial vise.

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

... was a phrase I heard my public-high-school-educated daughter effortlessly spout the other day, clearly something she had heard repeatedly in school. I asked her what it meant and she just repeated it. I asked her what extremist Catholics might do. She had no clue as her education had been limited to slogans. Having met her teachers, it's a good bet that most of their knowledge is limited to slogans as well.

I pointed out that I was an extremist Catholic and I hung out regularly with other extremist Catholics. The most extreme of them put in a couple of nights a week at the local prisons, listening to the inmates, counseling them and doing what they can to let the inmates know someone cares about them. Ultra-extremist Catholics have even started a business designed entirely to help ex-cons get free of crime and lead a better life. These are the men I admire and seek to imitate in becoming an even more extremely extreme extremist Catholic.

So, yes, every religion has extremists. So what?

(Standard photo with snarky caption of extremist Muslims beheading or burning people omitted.)

Tuesday, February 17, 2015

A decent rainstorm in Fresno can bump up it's totals by 15-20% as seen from the 2014 graph.

The two graphs together show there hasn't been a decent rainstorm since mid-December.

When I started this project, it looked to be a wet year. It's now another drought year in Fresno.

San Diego is down to 84% of normal rainfall, so SoCal is dry as well.

Wunderground weather says we might get 0.1" of rain on Sunday, but that's it for the next 10 days.

Ouch.

I'm doing something wrong in my use of the Google graphing library because it's treating the x-axis data points as incremental points instead of values. That is, if my database has the dates from 12 Jan to 18 Jan missing, it puts the points on the graph next to each other instead of 6 ticks apart. I moved back to date numbers instead of dates trying to solve the problem, but it hasn't worked.

Monday, February 16, 2015

You are what you consume. Mentally, you are what you read, hear and see.

At lunch after Mass with one of our sons yesterday, he asked me if I thought the nation was more divided politically than it had been in a long, long time. I said I thought it was.

Social media like Twitter, Facebook and blogs like this one give everyone a voice. With so many to choose from, it's almost trivial to limit what you consume to people who think just like you. I would argue that for the most part, politically active people have organized themselves into bubbles. The only information that breaks the boundary are things designed to get everyone worked up and reinforce the culture within the bubble. That's why the conservative Twitterverse was echoing with photos of Obama with his selfie stick (he's a narcissist!) and the progressive one goes into histrionics every time a black person gets shot by a cop (racism!).

The dude was given a selfie stick. It's OK. It's not a sign of mental illness. For every black shot by a cop there are hundreds shot by other backs. It's not racism, it's a marker of societal breakdown.

My browser home page is a table of links I maintain myself. I used to have a section labeled "politics" which included Instapundit, Hot Air, Ricochet and Real Clear Politics. That home page dominates my Internet consumption. It's designed to give me the links I want every time I open the browser. My politics links reinforced my bubble and gave me many doses of outrage every day. Like a good, little foot soldier for The Cause, I responded with dutiful anger.

Today, I wiped out that section. In its place, I added to my sports section. One site in particular, Squawka, can fill up my Internet leisure time quite easily.

I could spend hours every day on Squawka.

My outrage stimuli gave me grist for the blog. It was simplicity itself to find something to rail against. A daily blog is a remorseless, information-eating machine so those political red-meat hurlers gave me the catalysts I needed to whip out yet one more diatribe and feed my blogging beast.

It also wasted irreplaceable neurotransmitters on pointless anger. Due to limited fuel supplies in your head, you can only have so many thoughts in a day. One more blog post here about how Hillary Clinton is a power-mad harpy is going to be read by 40 people at the cost of burning quite a bit of my mental fuel.

Pointless, wasteful and more than that, sinful.

I know I've blogged about this in the past many times. Vows have been taken, held for a while and then dropped. I'm a fallen creature, bound to err. I'm also forgiven when I confess and atone. With each such renewal comes a chance to make changes to at least reduce the frequency of my failures. Maybe by spending more time on Squawka and less on Instapundit I can see some progress.

Saturday, February 14, 2015

Breitbart's Big Hollywood has an interesting review of 50 Shades. After reading it, I want to go see the movie, if only to plumb the depths of our modern, progressive, secular culture. In the review is this tidbit.

(The movie is a) $40 million studio-produced piece of feminist wish-fulfillment that plays like a pimp’s guide to breaking down a nice girl into a sniveling, needy doormat who is willing, literally, to wait naked on her knees in Pimp Daddy’s “Red Room of Pain” whenever he commands.

Pimps are master manipulators at convincing inexperienced young girls what love is and that they “like it.”

The foundation of those relationship dyamics is human sexual dimorphism. Women need love, men need sex. If you accepted that, you'd realize that sadism is the ultimate power imbalance. Statistically speaking (no, I don't have the data in front of me now), it's the man exerting dominance over the woman to fulfill his every fantasy while holding the reward of some small amount of emotional fulfillment over her.

As the reviewer, John Nolte, asks, "where’s your feminist god now?"

The psychologists that tell us sadism is normal and healthy are not advocates of male dominance, so the only thing I can think is that they've completely rejected the concept of sexual dimorphism. That's not such a leap when you consider how saturated the culture is with stories praising one women after another for breaking down barriers and succeeding in traditionally male roles. Sex differences were all cultural and we're washing away the last traces of the oppressive patriarchy. Hurrah!

Cultural acceptance of sadism, then, is part of the evolution of our concepts of sexual differences.

Friday, February 13, 2015

Wednesday was my 9th Blogiversary with more than 6,900 posts here. It's a tribute to monomania more than anything else. I've only done a couple of Blogiversary posts and this one seems pretty hard to top in terms of what I'm doing wasting my time with a keyboard every morning.

The Krugman thing in the title comes from the fact that the guy writes the same column over and over and over again. Every tiny piece of data, every little news story sends him running in the same hamster wheel he ran in last week, last month, last year, last decade. What's even more impressive is that he's a Goebbels without a Hitler to idolize. Krugman is an out-and-out fascist, desiring nothing save more government control over the economy, but he lacks a Great Man to fawn over.

How does he do it?

Me, I'm bored with most of my old hobby horses. I trot them out once in a while and they still color my world view quite thoroughly, but I can't make every single post an examination of debt, traditional families, Catholicism or any of the rest. How does Paul Krugman overcome intellectual boredom? He's a marvel, that one. My hat's off to the old Reichsminister für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda.

If I did what Krugman did, the ever-growing tedium of it all would cause me to contract lycanthropy and I'd turn into a were-sloth.

Having said that, I've become completely fascinated by societal acceptance of sadism. How on Earth did we get to the point that sadism is beyond reproach? Talk about mining a rich vein of insanity! The only thing I can think of is that we now so worship sex that if you take any mental illness or social pathology, no matter how extreme, and add an orgasm to it, it's no longer an affliction, but a blessing.

I laughed writing that last sentence. Societal craziness is hilarious.

On to another year of blogging! Thanks so much for coming along.

* - OK, so I miss a day now and again, but for the most part it's been every day.

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

ISTANBUL—Finance leaders from the world’s largest economies endorsed on Tuesday aggressive stimulus measures taken by many of their central banks recently as vital responses necessary to boost a weak global economy.

Drunks outside of the Night Owl endorsed Dollar Shot Night at the bar.

“Current economic conditions require accommodative monetary policies in some countries,” the G-20 said in an official statement. “We welcome that central banks take appropriate monetary policy action.”

"We've been panhandling all day and didn't come up with more than $15 each. We need a more accomodative policy at the Nigh Owl."

“There’s not enough demand in the United States to drive the whole global recovery,” said a senior U.S. Treasury official. Governments need “to use the levers that are available to create sustainable growth.”

"We tried working at that day labor place, but it's just not a fit for us. We need lower-cost booze for a little while so we can figure out what to do next."

Luckily for us, the finance leaders are looking for "sustainable growth" and not just a pile of printed money to hand out so they can go back to their government meetings and talk about what big shots they are.

Sunday, February 08, 2015

How is it that people can consider hurting, dominating or humiliating someone you love to be "normal?" What is the basis for calling sado-masochism "normal?"

After reading this excellent piece by Jennifer Fitz, I did a very brief Google search on BDSM perfectly normal or something pretty close to that. First, a representative excerpt from Jennifer.

The difficulty is that if you are a person who experiences sexual arousal in some untoward context (whether BDSM or anything else), if the wider society is telling you that your feelings are entirely consistent with your highest good, and therefore you ought to feel free to act upon them, you are suddenly bereft of any moral safety-net to bring you back to reality.

I've also been listening to Ben Shapiro's excellent analysis of Millennial morality, Porn Generation. Ben argues convincingly that the Millenials have no moral foundation at all and then gives reams of stats and anecdotes to show just how adrift they are. While listening to that and then reading Jennifer's post, I pondered the biological background to BDSM.

If our dogs, the Catican Guards, started injuring themselves on purpose, I would not conclude that they were engaging in a perfectly legitimate alternate lifestyle, but that there was something dreadfully wrong. Dogs that hurt themselves are exhibiting signs of high levels of stress. It's not good and if you care for the animal, you need to take decisive steps right away.

How is BDSM different? A quick perusal of my Google search hits yielded this piece by Laura Berman, PhD. Here's an excerpt.

BDSM is an acronym for sexual activity that incorporates bondage, discipline, domination, submission, sadism, and masochism — and it may be more common than you think. According to research from the Kinsey Institute, 55 percent of females and 50 percent of males derive sexual pleasure from pain (such as having lovers bite them). And, according to the Durex 2005 Global Sex Survey, 20 percent of people report engaging in “kinky play” with their partners, including the use of blindfolds, bondage, and masks.

Many people find that BDSM is a normal and healthy way to explore their sexuality. In BDSM behaviors, the individual is deriving pleasure from pain, or pleasure from being completely dominated or completely dominant. The fact that people would enjoy these activities is easy to understand when you study how the brain works: The pain and pleasure centers of the brain are very closely related, and so there are times when it really does “hurt so good.”

There's so much to work with here, but a couple of things jumped out at me immediately.

The Kinsey Institute might not be the worst place to find research materials, but it's got to be pretty near the bottom. Kinsey himself was a monumental pervert whose equally perverted "research" was designed to do nothing more than validate his own mental health problems. It did this in spades as the popular media devoured it like so much arsenic-laced cotton candy. Anyone who refers to a Kinsey Institute study is instantly suspect.

To me that shouts that Laura Berman's research is probably weak. The next paragraph provides more data.

Saying that the pain and pleasure centers in the brain are "closely related" tells you nothing of value. Closely related how? I'm no expert, but I know from pain and anyone suggesting that pain and pleasure are closely related is deliberately obfuscating the issue so they can sell something else. Animals avoid pain. Animals seek pleasure. That's why our Maximum Leader hates baths, but loves getting a drink from the faucet. There's a significant difference between the two.

Laura is degreed and seems to have a lot of cache in the field. She's also got the feel of an evangelist, peddling a point of view instead of cold analysis. In reality, deriving pleasure from pain in animals is a sign of serious problems. For some reason, Laura's all sunshine and light when it comes to sadism and masochism.

So the question is: Why? What's the lure of BDSM to someone like Laura? To me, it's a religious status symbol. She's showing her colleagues just how orthodox she is. She's a secular postmodern and acceptance of every conceivable source of orgasm is an article of faith.

Laura Berman is a religious fundamentalist.

You know, it would make it a lot easier on the rest of us if orthodox secularist postmoderns would dress in a particular way so we could recognize them by sight.

Saturday, February 07, 2015

Wired has an article about autonomous military robots and how they could be programmed to kill people without a human in the loop. They're not talking about guided missiles which do that already, but drones and odds and ends like that. In the article, they posit a typically postmodern Western solution to the problem. Laws.

Military drones like the Predator currently are controlled by humans, but Gariepy says it wouldn’t take much to make them fully automatic and autonomous. That worries him. A lot. “The potential for lethal autonomous weapons systems to be rolled off the assembly line is here right now,” he says, “but the potential for lethal autonomous weapons systems to be deployed in an ethical way or to be designed in an ethical way is not, and is nowhere near ready.”

For Gariepy, the problem is one of international law, as well as programming. In war, there are situations in which the use of force might seem necessary, but might also put innocent bystanders at risk. How do we build killer robots that will make the correct decision in every situation? How do we even know what the correct decision would be?

In the comments lives another lovely postmodern Western idea: moral equivalence.

Commenter 1: A human still tells them what to destroy, even if they self pilot. Allowing a robot to decide what to kill is just a bad idea. Imagine if someone built a small swarm of flying robots, then programmed them to kill as many people as possible. That is the kind of horror this could unleash if the bad guys use it...

Commenter 2: Remind me again, who are the "bad" guys...?

Finally, there is this lovely bit of postmodern Western effluvium - paranoid, universal accusations of racism.

ISIS just killed a POW by burning him alive. They recorded it and posted it on the Internet. No one questions whether it happened or who did it. In spite of this, we still talk about "laws" as if they had some authority and question the righteousness of our position. We ponder robotic killing machines, yet we don't consider what might happen if they were deployed by people who incinerate captives for fun.

Sometimes I think we're going to lose this war out of sheer ennui.

Sir Charles James Napier. When confronted in India with a crowd ready to burn a widow out of native custom, he replied, "Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs."He lived in a time of national customs, poor chap.

Tuesday, February 03, 2015

My daughter's high school is a regular cesspit of progressive indoctrination. Two more data points popped up this week. Her government teacher gave them a 50-question political survey to take. Based on their answers, they were told if they identified more with Democrats or Republicans. 100% of the class identified as Democrats. In a school that servers a large population of military families from the South, the entire class identified as Democrats.

Right. No angle to the questions there.

In English, instead of reading, they watch videos. This week was a video about Christopher McCandless.

The hippy dip himself, in front of the abandoned bus where he starved to death.

Short version: Chris was a progressive dingbat who traveled to Alaska to be one with nature. Untrained and without basic equipment, he lived in an abandoned bus in the wilds until he starved to death. My daughter's teacher lionized the fellow, recommending his lifestyle to the class. A ranger living in Alaska was not so sanguine.

When you consider McCandless from my perspective, you quickly see that what he did wasn’t even particularly daring, just stupid, tragic and inconsiderate. First off, he spent very little time learning how to actually live in the wild. He arrived at the Stampede Trail without even a map of the area. If he had a good map he could have walked out of his predicament using one of several routes that could have been successful. Consider where he died. An abandoned bus. How did it get there? On a trail. If the bus could get into the place where it died, why couldn’t McCandless get out of the place where he died? The fact that he had to live in an old bus in the first place tells you a lot. Why didn’t he have an adequate shelter from the beginning? What would he have done if he hadn’t found the bus? A bag of rice and a sleeping bag do not constitute adequate gear and provisions for a long stay in the wilderness.

Ranger Pete goes on at considerable length leaving little doubt that McCandless was akin to the trust fund progressives who are the core of the Occupy movement.

Fortunately, the teachers have contributed to the formation of a generation so centered on pleasure and rife with cynicism that all this indoctrination isn't creating passionate revolutionaries, but instead, a rather indifferent mob. At least that's the way it seems from my daughter's anecdotes about how her classmates are reacting to the teachers.

Monday, February 02, 2015

The best two, of course, would be for Green Bay or New Orleans to win. Barring that, watching the Seahawks choke the game away in the last seconds to the soulless, unfeeling machine that is the New England Patriots was wonderful.

Watching the Packers blow a sure thing against the Seahawks two weeks ago, I must confess that my heart was turned to the Dark Side. I had told friends that I wanted to see the Patriots win 56-7, followed by Bill Belichick strangling puppies on live TV. Yesterday's game was even better, though.

The Packers lost through a series of insanely improbable plays. Watching Seattle come within 36 inches of winning through a similarly crazy play and then lose the game on an even more improbable one was not only just desserts, but a full 7-course just meal, complete with just champagne, excellent just wines and just brandy and just cigars in the Gun Room afterwards.